The present invention is related to the field of validating user input in a graphical user interface of a computerized system.
A common function of a graphical user interface is to provide a mechanism for a user of a computerized system, such as personal computer or workstation, to enter data that is to be provided to an application program. The application program may be executing on the computerized system itself, or it may be executing on another computer that is communicatively coupled to the computerized system. This latter configuration is common, for example, in distributed “client-server” applications of the type commonly deployed in the Internet-based World Wide Web. In Web applications, the user interface is in the form of a Web page that is displayed on a user's personal computer by a browser application. The Web page contains various fields for data entry along with user-activatable objects such as buttons and scroll bars, for example.
Many applications, including Web-based client server applications, provide some degree of checking or validation of user-entered data. Such validation might take the form, for example, of determining whether entered data is of the correct type or amount. In current systems, it is common for validation to be performed only after all the data for a particular page has been entered and the user has activated a “complete” or “submit” button. The page is transferred from the client to the server, where the application program performs the validation of the input data on the page. If one or more errors are found, the page is re-posted on the user's display with an error message. The error message commonly appears near the top of the re-posted page so as to be readily noticed by the user.